Viena, 20-22 de julho de 2026
Deadline for abstracts submissions: December 29th, 2025, 23:59 (CET, Vienna)
https://rc21-vienna2026.org/call-for-abstracts/
#65 Mobility Regimes between daily travel practices and Migration. Navigating Inequalities, Diversities, and Accessibility in Contemporary Urban Transformations
Session chair(s):
Maria Manuela Mendes (CIES-Iscte e ISCSP, Ulisboa), Matteo Colleoni Luca, Simone Caiello Stefania Toma (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities / Babes-Bolyai University)
Format type: Regular Panel
Description:
Contemporary inequalities in Europe and beyond are increasingly produced at the intersection of mobility, migration, and spatial organization. On the one hand, international, transnational, and internal mobilities reshape the social and spatial fabric of cities, metropolitan regions, and semi-urban/rural territories, bringing to the fore issues of diversity, categorical inequalities (class, gender, ethnicity, migrant status), and differentiated access to housing, services, and education. On the other hand, these mobility practices unfold within what has been conceptualized as mobility regimes (Kesselring, 2014) — configurations of infrastructures, policy frameworks, socio-technical arrangements, and governing narratives that determine who can move, how, where, and at what cost. Such regimes are never neutral: they are historically and politically situated and deeply implicated in the (re)production of social and spatial inequalities.
As a result, cities and metropolitan regions are become sites where inclusion and exclusion are both produced and contested.
The plurality of contemporary inequalities asks for a nuanced understanding of how mobility regimes shape both the movement of people and the (re)production of social inequalities in daily lives (from working conditions to reproductive activities and leisure) across European territories and beyond.
To understand how urban and spatial planning, mobility governance, and policy frameworks influence social stratification and everyday practices is essential to pay particular attention to conditions of social disadvantages, like transport poverty (Lucas et al., 2016) that encompasses economic, spatial, temporal, and infrastructural barriers that limit individual’s ability to reach essential opportunities such as work, education, housing, services, and social networks.
We welcome contributions grounded in direct experiences of migrants and mobile populations, as well as theoretical reflections, empirical research., and comparative perspectives that critically engage with experiences of mobile subjects, the way spatialized inequalities are produced and / contested, and how governance and policy responses mitigate or exacerbate multiple marginalities.
We invite papers that address the following questions (but are not limited to):
• How do migration and everyday mobility practices interact with existing mobility regimes to reconfigure social and spatial landscapes across urban, peri-urban, and rural/metropolitan contexts and what are the lived experiences of migrants navigating these regimes?
• How do policy and governance arrangements respond to (or fail to address) the right to the city, housing, and service access for diverse and mobile populations?
• In what ways do transport and accessibility infrastructures intersect with class, gender, ethnicity, and migrant status to reproduce or alleviate spatialized and multi-dimensional inequalities, within restrictive mobility regimes and transport poverty?
• How can empirically grounded studies inform forward-looking, justice-oriented interventions in mobility, spatial planning, and urban–regional development?
• What new methodological and comparative approaches can be used to capture the mobility-related accessibility, the interplay between physical/digital infrastructures, and lived experiences of inequality?